RFalvo69
Posts: 1380
Joined: 7/11/2013
From: Lamezia Terme (Italy)
Status: offline
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Both branches of my family are very longeve. On my father's side, my grandfather died at 94 years old, my grandma at 92. On my mother side, my grandma died at 93 years old. Only my grandfather died when he was 48 years old, but due to permanent wounds he suffered during WWI. He lived all his life with an Austro-Hungarian machinegun bullet lodged in his spine (he was a colonel when this happened, decorated with two silver stars, and, as the times required, he was wounded while leading his troops from the front); he was also hit, not seriously, by a second bullet. He kept it and made a ring out of it - a ring that he wore for the rest of his life.
Somehow he lived a full and normal life - until one day in 1946, out of the blue, the bullet caused a form of blood poisoning which killed him in three days.
My father's father married very young with his high-school sweethart. As it happens, one year later she died in childbirth leaving a healthy daughter. My grandpa took this event so badly that he left the care of his daughter, Cristina, to his two sisters, and enlisted in the Bersaglieri. It was 1911, and that very November he landed in Libya with the first wave during the opening phase of the Italo-Turkish War. He served until 1915 (always stationed in Africa - from Libya to Somalia). Coincidentally, when Italy entered WWI in 1915 he had served for four years, and he was a widow with a daughter, so he was actually discharged.
During the war he met and married his second wife. They had a son and a daughter - but Fate struck again, and his second wife died in 1919 of the Spanish Flu.
With two daughters and a son - not to mention, according to his family and friends, being totally emotionally broken - he woved to never marry again.
Until, in 1930, he met my grandma, Maria. They married and had FOUR children: one daughter and three sons. My father was the younger. Tragically, the middle son, Mario, was killed when his bycicle was hit by a car. Luckily, this was the last tragedy which hit my grandfather.
Now, think about it: my maternal grandfather was this close to be killed in WWI. My father's father saw two wifes die young due to a cruel Fate, and married his third wife after eleven years (and after wowing to never marry again). They had four children, and I'm the son of the last one.
Just think about these two stories, and then think: what was the probability, for me, to be born at all? Very, very, very close to zero. And this doesn't consider what happened to the people who came before my two immediate families.
It doesn't matter if you are a religious, spiritual or materialistic person: the very fact that each of us is here, writing on this forum, is a miracle. And, for some reason, something I, honestly, always try not to think about. I look at my two daughters and that's what really matters: life is like a river which flows through infinite ramifications: it will always find the next one and flow on.
Sorry, I blathered a bit 
_____________________________
"Yes darling, I served in the Navy for eight years. I was a cook..."
"Oh dad... so you were a God-damned cook?"
(My 10 years old daughter after watching "The Hunt for Red October")
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RE: OT Things to ponder - 
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